Cooking outside the United States looks a bit different. One expat wrote about how she hates your big American kitchen. Another compared expat kitchens with the ultra-modern, totally decked-out, restaurant-caliber American kitchen. Look around at your kitchen and I’ll tell you about mine and make a confession.

My Djiboutian kitchen is roughly 5X7 feet. This means I can reach any spice or knife or bowl with a simple twist or, at most, two medium-sized steps. There is a spice shelf because my husband loves me and built one. There are no cupboards because he doesn’t love me that much. Okay, the real reason there are no cupboards is because there just aren’t.

I have a one-sided sink with no drain stopper. My house helper or I wash dishes in a big red Tupperware bowl and rinse them in the sink. They dry either on the counter or on the carpet in the living room under the ceiling fan. I have one faucet with one handle and it always runs at one temperature. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer. And always slightly salty.

Open counter space is about two and a half feet long. Just long enough to bake cookies with one kid on the counter. Just long enough to roll out cinnamon buns. Just short enough to make sure the only appliances we have are appliances we use. Hot water pot, toaster, bread machine, blender (from my grandpa’s kitchen), and a voltage regulator. A little too short to hold all our dirty dishes if I get lazy on the days our house helper doesn’t come.

For six years I used a narrow, European-style stove and oven that had a single functioning burner. Six. Years. One. Burner.

Now I have a lovely stove with four burners and an oven wide enough for two cookie sheets at the same time. Some people might think granite countertops or heated floor tiles or cathedral-style ceilings or subzero freezers are luxury. I’m telling you, four burners and two cookie sheets is luxury.

The fridge is propped up on scraps of cardboard to keep it level and has been this way since the day we bought it brand new. Either the floor is crooked or Italy ships it’s wonky fridges to countries like Djibouti to resell. Neither would surprise me.

Dishes are kept in the living room because there are no cupboards. Other than a few specialty items like Ranch dressing and peanut butter (which are in a closet), food is mostly kept in the fridge or on one of two shelves or at the grocery store or neighborhood dukaan until I need it.

huge step up from my Somaliland kitchen – there was a fridge. No electricity.

I have a blue or gray or rusty gas bomb next to the stove and there are electrical cords looping around the walls, over the door, snaking their way to the voltage regulator.

My Djiboutian kitchen is massive compared to a lot of Djiboutian kitchens. And my Djiboutian kitchen has provided heaps of entertainment and delicious food and memories. But sometimes I’m still jealous of those American kitchens where kids perch on countertops and there are sunny nooks and you can drink your coffee while actually sitting down on a chair.

My Djiboutian kitchen is not beautiful or spacious or trendy. It is functional and it functions well. When we moved to Africa, I thought spaghetti sauce came from a jar of Ragu and pizza had to either be delivered or frozen. I have used half a dozen African kitchens, small and cramped and not always well-stocked but I have learned to slice a tomato in my hand and to knead bread while squatting on the floor and that it isn’t the size of the kitchen that matters but the taste of the food and the love of the family and the sharing of meals with guests from all over the world.

16 Comments

At the beginning of the new year we moved from a one room rondavel to a house on a plot. I’m not much of a cook, but my kitchen is nice and simple, much larger than at the rondavel. Thanks for sharing your kitchen.

you could’ve been describing my kitchen the first 10 years we’ve lived here. dishes in a plastic tub – ha!!! like, literally! ‘cept mine was long and narrow and it took about five steps to get anything, we did have cupboards built in under the granite counters (roach hostels, actually)and ones set into the wall above my head – almost out of reach but if i put anything substantial in them, they’d start to pull out of the wall so we painted them green and mostly considered them decoration.

but my kitchen now? it is to die for and is the nicest kitchen i’ll probably ever have and so I ENJOY it. our organization decided to build 2 homes on our mission property and this one was designed with my family in mind. we have a great room/open kitchen with cathedral ceiling, island with bar (hides the mess quite well most of the time) western looking cabinets with glass doors, very nice sized pantry right along the side wall, lots of storage place, 110/220 electric access. there’s even a ceiling and exhaust fan. before here, in the kitchen at our most recent before here house, i had one of those plastic spatulas literally melt on the counter while i was baking bread. had my mom send me stainless steel after that.

we have the extra large version of the local stoves. only 4 of the five burners work, the oven cooks unevenly (like 50-60 degrees difference moving from left to right) and i keep two bread pans turned upside down on the floor of the oven to create a 2nd rack – but it is big enough to cook 4 loaves of bread and a double batch of cinn rolls all at the same time as long as I remember to gently rotate positions at the right time. my hubby had to build a platform for it – otherwise it was singe-ing the new cabinetry around it and now one of the feet is missing, so it sits partly on a rock as well. our fridge is from italy and sounds like it has the same issues except ours doesn’t seal well unless we have a chair propped against it. we’ve actually found fridges to be luxuries and have spent several months without a working one – while a freezer, on the other hand, (ice) is mandatory.

today’s a holiday from school – and my kiddos and i will be baking choc/pb cookies today in that kitchen with room for all of us to work and dance and yatter around together. we’d invite y’all to join us if the commute wasn’t so far.

Aaahh! I love it! I love hearing about your old kitchen and your new kitchen and your appliances. So funny and so totally relatable! I am jealous of your 110/220 power access and ceiling fan. Those are also luxury items. I find it so fantastic how you manage to make it all work – that’s what it takes. Not complaining, but creativity. We’d love to join you for cookies, maybe another decade. Or maybe in paradise!

I think your kitchen is very pretty. Actually it Remonds me of the ones we had overseas and I miss them now. Believe it or not, I’ve seen some in magazines as the minimum look is rather populat now and concrete countertops are what is ‘in’
Not everyone here in the states have those huge lovely kitchens.

Thanks Neva. I DID miss things about my Djiboutian kitchen while we were in the US last year. I think no matter where you cook, if you cook there long enough, you turn it into your own place that fits and works. Funny that the minimal look is popular now, I guess there are always ebbs and flows.

I know exactly what you mean about how your definition of “luxury” changed when you moved to Africa! In my village house in Cameroon, our little “kitchen” was really just the stove, counter, and sink along one of the walls in the front room. We had no running water, but we had water jugs with spouts that we could use like taps, and our sink drained into a bucket. Our city friends and Western families thought it sounded so primitive, but for us it felt really self-indulgent. “Running” water in the house? Even a toilet in the bathroom?? Talk about luxury!

On of the funniest things about that kitchen was that I am a foot or more shorter than my roommate and she had had the counters built to her size, so I had to stand on a stool if I wanted to cook, clean, or do dishes. More than once, a passing neighbor would burst out laughing at the sight of me on my stool. Visitors would tease me about being so short. It became a running joke among our friends.

Wow – no running water. Except in Somalia and except when the water pump is broken and except when the water tank is empty, I’ve had running water. But your comment is so great – like Richelle’s, you make it work and then stop thinking about it, it becomes part of life. I love hearing these kinds of things from all over!

I very much enjoy reading your blog! We have some other friends in you part of the world and I love directing them to your blog to help understand the place, culture and live in general over there. I admit that most of the kitchens I had in East Africa were a little more functional. But you are right, maybe it’s just that you make them work for you.

This last time I was there I was at the wrought iron workers several times to get things like a 3-tier basket stand made.

One thing to point out – I know we called them this too, but the ‘gas bomb’ is really a gas bottle or tank. I hope no one thinks something might explode in your kitchen. Although you never know…

Yeah – we like calling them gas bombs I guess. Not sure why…Very safe! I’m thankful for my kitchen, I feel like it has what I need and I’m loving my new oven, and that hanging basket in the picture has been with us for 10 years. That’s one of the things I missed while in the US last year.

You kitchen looks very familiar, same sink, same oven, same cloth on the window sill. In Afghanistan, we did have running water and a couple counters, but my house helpers always preferred to do all prep work on the floor.
One year we didn’t have an oven, but used a large metal pot with sand on the bottom and four upturned tuna fish cans to place cookie sheets or cake pans on. Worked pretty well, but I sure was happy to get a gas oven in the next move.
We head back to Afghanistan in a month. I wonder what changes have happened and what my new kitchen will look like. For sure I’ve packed tiny cookie sheets, good knives and good vanilla.

I just had someone bring vanilla from the US – good stuff. I did find some here but bake so often I go through the miniature bottle in a few weeks. Yeah for good knives too! I have never not had an oven – seems like that would be rough. But I guess you just learn to cook/eat differently or you get creative like you did. Funny that ours look so similar!

I am one of the few women in Niamey with a dishwasher in her kitchen. Between that, the space, and the cabinets, I’m living the high life. For photos of my kitchen and ramblings about my struggle to have a good attitude in there, go to https://daveandhope.thejohanssons.net/in-the-kitchen/

Thanks for the link – a dishwasher! That is the high life, enjoy it! :O) I laughed at the picture of the sink with all the pipes and things underneath it. Yup. And the pink tiles half-way up the walls. Yup. Amazing how alike kitchens are in some places, but places that are so far away! My kithcne right now is all white tiles. The old one was halfway brown tiles, then beige paint.

Love this! It reminds me of our kitchens growing up in Pakistan. Egypt was a bit more modern I went to a flea market last year and one of the stall set ups looked just like our kitchen did growing up – it was too funny to see all these things being sold as “antiques” that made up our kitchen.Contrasts in kitchens and bathrooms across the world is a study of cultural values! In America kitchens are gorgeous, but very few people actually cook in them – people eat out or do one or two meals a week. By contrast many other parts of the world have limited space, supplies, and stoves, not to mention the luxury of refrigerators and yet rarely eat out, if ever.